


Hamartia is a Planet to the Left of Aldebaran

by Zampano



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Are you even allowed to post poetry on AO3, I know it, I'm committing a faux pas of some magnitude here, M/M, Poetry: the tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2020-08-11 16:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20156908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zampano/pseuds/Zampano
Summary: Look at the bright side:There is no body to burn this time.(A poem from the Master's POV.)





	1. Chapter 1

  
Look at the bright side:  
There is no body to burn this time.  
  
_I’m sitting in the morning,_  
_At the diner, on the corner –_  
And that’s how the song goes.  
Of course I’m going to kill you.  
Or maybe I have. _I am waiting at the counter,_  
_For the man to pour the coffee._  
At some point, anyway.  
Linear memory is a fickle romantic.  
Perhaps it was in the dark morning  
of the universe,  
where we both broke the dawn  
and I bore the brunt of the blame.  
Before time was coursing her merry way  
over the gravel bed of good intentions.  
  
_It is always nice to see you,_  
_says the man behind the counter._  
And so you wander once more  
into these halls I’ve built for you.  
So poised to commit regicide,  
but woe. The emperor is out hunting,  
and you’ll have to wait.  
But you know it’s always been that sort of song.  
Moral high ground. Detonators.  
The Pharos Project. Chronovores.  
Where we go, the battle goes.  
And wherever we go,  
the abyss is not far behind.  
You never stopped trying to work it out,  
all those computations of probable realities  
where you said, come and see.  
And I said, I do.  
Nice block transfer there, dickhead,  
but math was never your strong suit.  
Yet, this is still the bright side:  
There is still no body to burn,  
but the wonderful crematorium of Earth  
and all of its creatures, great and small.  
  
This is the story only you were meant to hear.  
It’s about hunger, war,  
disease and time. I’ll do the voices.  
It begins where we went wading  
through the filth of history  
and it was an exercise in how  
it might be kinder to die.  
And what did it bring us both?  
The blackness of possibility but you won’t partake of it.  
Some good that’ll do.  
It brought us those dry, dread oceans  
on Hyades Neti that made you cry  
(but were otherwise unremarkable).  
Brought us the reminder  
that wherever we go,  
the abyss will forever ruminate  
under where we make a stand.  
Brought you the conviction  
I thrive amongst corpses.  
Brought you the delusion you don’t.  
  
It’s in the grand disorder of all things.  
Look at you now. Hot mess wetware.  
All impulse. I love impulse.  
Look at us both.  
Dredged up and dressed up.  
Encased in youth. Pretty.  
Can’t wait for time to wreck us both again and harder.  
Snuff us out with a billion suns  
and a trillion dead worlds revolving.  
They wouldn’t know they’re dead,  
obviously. Not that it would stop them.  
What’s an orbit if not a prison?  
What’s gravity if not chains?  
(I’ve met the ouroboros too, you know.  
Extremely sanctimonious bitch.)  
Give me your dormant little fairytales.  
where you want me to fill your vacancy.  
I’ll give you this, where I want to show you  
what the dead are good for.  
Wherever we go –  
Well, I am the abyss.  
  
It could be something simple,  
like your vastness resists mine.  
But it cannot be so soft or sad or sensible.  
It’s about the fallout.  
It’s about the setup.  
_I am thinking of your voice –_  
_and of the midnight picnic_  
_once upon a time before the rain began._  
It’s about hopes and dreams. Not yours,  
certainly. Could be mine, but unlikely.  
Maybe the dream in which we found  
the grave of our last universal ancestor  
and he was buried on some ruined planet  
in some ruined sector,  
in some ruined and ravaged galaxy  
far out of the reach of lucid thought.  
His epitaph spoke in dream-speech:  
_No mercy for the dead._  
Or maybe it said:  
Dead man’s mercy.  
Translations are always a little tricky.  
And still you said, come and see.  
(The ouroborus told me this:  
_I keep swallowing myself_  
_but I am never done._)  
And I said, no, come with me,  
and I’ll show you how everything burns  
screaming for mercy from the eternal light.  


  


____________


	2. Missed That Turn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wrote a sequel. It's sappy and positive and I'm so, so sorry.

Here’s the foreword.  
You know what this is:  
It scrapes on your bones  
with its talons of entropy.  
It floods your pneumatics.  
It settles itself into your flesh  
and makes a thousand cuts  
from the inside.

Give me your silent rainfall  
and I’ll give you the tale of  
how I scuffled with a pitiful,  
suffering little thing called – 

Or I won’t. Whoever hears of this tale will die.   
But that can be said of any tale.   
Finding a story where the listener will never die   
– Well, that’s more the stuff of legend, isn’t it?

Let’s make it what it is:   
A story about how you look stupid pretty  
in the glow of all this radiating impossibility.  
The absurdity of it, thickening the treacle of time,  
flooding us both, drowning us in a sightless sea.  
But who’s listening? Get your foot off this catastrophe.  
Can’t stop with just one, can we?  
The universe is still young  
and we are full of dynamite  
and poorly-timed repartee.  
Here’s how the story goes, I’d say,  
but look, I’m busy.   
It’s hard work, slicing inevitability’s guts open  
on the knife’s edge of history.  
Someone’s gotta do it. It’s always going to be me.

You’d be an abyss if you weren’t a graveyard, too.   
And that’s the kindest thing you ever did do.  
(But I’d have done a finer job and you know that’s true.)

Yet here you are, still with the come and see.  
And here I am now, with the  
you will honour and obey me.


End file.
